Most of the essays in this volume are concerned with historical and literary evidence for the discourses which surrounded the experience of labour and labourers in the late medieval period. This aim of this essay is specifically archaeological in that it seeks to understand the material framing of urban working identities through a particular form of architecture – the medieval guildhalls of York.

The ‘problem’ of labour in the late fourteenth century has generally been approached by historians through a range of written sources relating to its official regulation and control by national or local government. The Ordinance and Statute of Labourers and contemporary civic records have rightly been emphasized as the legislative and administrative mechanisms through which late medieval authorities sought to manipulate the labour market and labourers. Attention has also been drawn to the multiple discourses of labour expressed by literary and artistic works, and some of the essays in this volume are specifically concerned with this issue. However, although these sources tell us a great deal about the framing of labour by particular levels of national, aristocratic or civic authority, they do not necessarily inform us about the material conditions of labourers’ lives. An understanding of this issue has been gained through the reconstruction of their living standards and working practices. However an alternative tradition of historical scholarship has placed emphasis on the social and cultural practices of workers as a means of understanding the ways in which they sought to negotiate their social identity and relations with the wider community.

Isolating the ‘problem of labour’ in later fourteenth century England enables us to understand the origins of the discourses which dominated late medieval and early modern cultural and political understandings of work and perceptions of workers. It is however an heuristic device which privileges the activity of labour over other aspects of human experience. In reality, work is a field of discourse which intersects with many other aspects of social life, and labour identity is something which had to be worked at in relation to multiple and overlapping social roles and responsibilities. This essay is therefore concerned to establish some of the material mechanisms through which these links were actively structured. It starts from the premise that working identities were actively negotiated by workers themselves rather than being artificially imposed ‘from above’ by particular levels of authority.